Take an Oscar winner, an Oscar nominee, the guy from The Transporter and that kid who you might sorta remember from Not Another Teen Movie, give them one tenuous cell phone connection and a boatload of tension, and you end up with Cellular. A suspenseful thriller for the 21st century, the film centers around a young man whose carefree life is interrupted when he receives a mysterious cell phone call from a woman claiming to have been kidnapped, begging for help in saving her life. The film presented some daunting challenges to all involved, and while being interviewed recently for CountingDown they agreed they had never read a script quite like it before. But in the end, each still decided to answer the call.

'I stay in shape because I like it for me and for my life,' says star Kim Basinger, who at age 51 can still turn every head in the room. 'Knowing that you're going to do this type of film, there's no way in the world that you're not going to get injured if you're not in shape.'

In the film, Basinger plays Jessica Martin, a loving mother and wife who is taken prisoner and tossed into an attic by a group of men she doesn't know. The physically demanding role showed on Basinger, quite literally, every day. 'I had cuts, I had bruises, I had everything all over me. You can't be slammed against a mirror, you can't be slammed onto a table and thrown into a room unless you're somewhat capable of doing a balancing act.'

Since Jessica is locked in an attic for most of the film, she needs to rely on the compassion of a stranger who she's able to get a hold of when she tinkers with a shattered phone. Basinger says it was strange delivering most of her lines into a shattered receiver, but it was that unique aspect of the role that made her want to do it in the first place. 'I love the isolation of it. It was more like a play for me, and that's one of my biggest fears I've never done, to do a play. I'd never been isolated, to have to do my performance on the phone. That's tough. And when I heard who the cast was, I love William Macy, and Jason I adore, and I'd never heard of Chris, but he's wonderful.'

Macy is Mooney, a retiring policeman who helps Ryan [Chris Evans, Not Another...] in his quest to free Jessica from Greer, played by The Transporter's Jason Statham. Evans admits that he's not exactly a household name yet ('I can count on one hand the times I've been recognized. I never, ever get recognized anywhere.'), but hopes that his lead role in Cellular will be the big break he's been waiting for.

Since Evans often seems to be in a movie completely independent of Basinger's, it seems only appropriate that he would have been attracted to a different aspect of the script. 'I love fast paced movies,' says the twenty-three year old, who has been romantically linked to fellow hot young actor and Cellular star Jessica Biel. 'This was like (1994's) Speed. Some scripts you'll read for awhile and it has lulls, and you end up putting it down and thinking that you have to finish reading it at some point. This script, I just burned through it. It was that kind of immediate character reaction. You don't need this big long character journey that happens over a period of time. It's just that something happens, you react to it, go. I love that.'

Evans, like Basinger, says that he was a bit confused at first about how director David R. Ellis would film a movie about two people who don't know each other and are kept apart. Both actors agreed early on with the director that they shouldn't meet beforehand, so that they could be strangers on screen as naturally as they were in real life. This unusual choice often had both actors on set but isolated from one another, one delivering lines through a phone while the other reacted on camera. 'It served it's purpose, because in the film I'm not supposed to know who she is, and I'm not supposed to have any connection to her. So the fact that I had never met her and never seen her face helped a lot.'

Cellular has one of those great story hooks that seem so intriguing that it makes you wonder why no one had come up with the idea before. If you felt the same way about last year's Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth [guy picks up pay phone, finds sniper on the other end with a gun pointed at him], it's because they're both written by the same communication-obsessed mastermind. 'We live in a phone society. Every time you walk out of the house, you see people on cell phones now,' he says.

But, before you start thinking this speaker is a gadget-minded twenty-something who can't put his Palm Pilot down, you should realize that the films were written by Larry Cohen, a sixty-six year old industry veteran who got his start writing for the Kraft Television Theatre. If that surprises you, wait until you hear this statement: 'I don't even have a cell phone, and I don't want one. My wife bought me one as a gift, but I won't carry it. When I leave the house, I want to be by myself and enjoying my day. I don't want people calling me on the telephone. When I get home at night I'll get my messages. What's the big rush?'

Cohen is quite a character - a manic, expressive gentleman with a great sense of humor. His career has enjoyed a tremendous renaissance lately, as he sold five spec thriller scripts (Booth, Cellular, and the in-development Cast of Characters, Man Alive and Captivity) in five years. But it's that quirky sense of humor that makes his movies so entertaining, and his answers so confusing. After joking that his next movie will be about a rotary phone, Cohen then says with a straight face: 'The next one is called Messages Deleted, and it's about an answering machine.'

Ha ha, good joke - you would think. After a few moments of laughter, Cohen finishes his pitch: 'It's about a guy who comes home and finds messages on his answering machine from people who have been murdered. He hears the murders over the phone on his machine, but he doesn't know why all these people are calling him, because they're all strangers.' Then he just sits there, with a straight face, and you realize that sounds like a pretty good movie. Whether he's got his stars screaming into cell phones, standing in phone booths or possibly checking their answering machines, Larry Cohen loves making the ordinary into something thrilling. And the actors who carry out his stories line up for exactly that reason, even if they never get to meet each other.

For this and other interview, reviews and movie news, visit CountingDown.com